Determination of the Fail-Safety of Multichannel Voltage Converters with Power-Channel Rotation

Russian Electrical Engineering. 2020. Vol. 91. No. 7. P. 262–267.

Zhadnov V. V., Polesskiy S.

One promising trend in making voltage converters more reliable is to design them on the basis of backbone modular architecture, combined redundancy, and rotation of main and backup power channels. A technique is proposed for this converter for calculating the upper and the lower failsafe operation probability estimates that is based on using the standardized model for the sliding loaded redundancy group. It is shown that the session rate of failures can be used as the channel fail-safety indicator in the rotation of channels. The proposed technique allows finding these estimates as time functions and considering the rate of channel failures not only in the converter’s running mode, but in the standby mode as well. An example of calculating the converter’s failsafe operation estimates is presented; a similar calculation by imitative modeling is provided to confirm the obtained results. It is shown that a shortened full channel rotation cycle makes the channels spend the resource in a more even manner, has no effect on the converter’s fault-free performance figures at an absolutely reliable switch, and reduces them in the case of an unreliable switch.

Keywords: reliability, failure rate, redundancy, rotation, power channel, multichannel voltage converter, backbone modular architecture, failsafe operation probability, residual life